Business owners routinely face difficult decisions -- about laying off employees, about expanding a business, about remaining private or going public, among other things. As the business environment and culture evolve, the business community also confronts ethical issues, some of them of long standing and some more recent developments.

Pay Equality

Pay equality represents one of the longest-running ethical issues facing the business community. In 1963, the year the Equal Pay Act became law, women earned 58.9 percent of what men earned for full-time work, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. As of 2011, women earned on average only 77 percent of what men earned for full-time work. These figures suggest an entrenched policy of underpaying women for the same jobs men perform, even while many companies claim to embrace gender equality in terms of pay.

Accounting

Deceptive accounting practices can make companies in deep financial trouble look healthy on the surface. The collapse of Enron in 2001, which caused an estimated $60 billion company value to evaporate, stands as one of the primary recent examples of unethical accounting practices. In essence, Enron used mark-to-market accounting to inflate reported profits, while it also hid debt in a large number of shell companies to keep losses off its balance sheets. A 2008 survey conducted by Clemson University’s Institute for Ethics reports that CEOs consider improper accounting the No. 1 ethical issue faced by the general business community.

Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of interest arise when a person’s professional or personal obligations come up against a competing professional or personal obligation. A business owner might face a conflict of interest if, for example, a job opens up in the business and two people apply, one of whom the business owner knows. Ethically, the business owner should hire the most qualified applicant. The personal relationship with one of the applicants can lead the business owner to give that person the job, regardless of qualifications.

Sexual Harrassment

As women entered the workplace in increasing numbers in the middle of the 20th century, gender dynamics in the workplace shifted from a peripheral concern in the business community to a central issue. Sexual harassment, and the power imbalance that permits it, is a core ethical issue. One crucial question involved whether a superior and subordinate could ever engage in a truly consensual sexual relationship. While the answer remains unclear, the ambiguity itself suggests that sexual relationships of any kind in the workplace set a business and its owner up for sexual harassment charges.